Sinatra’s 100th Birthday

Host Ira Glass, with a recording of a 1962 Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr., appearance at the Villa Venice, a club outside Chicago. What's fascinating about Sinatra is how he is so many different people at once, and they're all on display in this recording: sentimental crooner, cruel woman-baiter, bully, goofball. Writer Rennie Sparks makes the case that Sinatra is mesmerizing because he's every man, every possible man, all rolled into one. (8 minutes)

Before Sinatra died, Sarah Vowell appeared on this radio program and made a prediction about how network news would cover Sinatra's death ... and she made a simple plea. We hear whether her prediction came true. This essay appears in Sarah's book, Take the Cannoli: Stories from the New World. (9 minutes)

Michael Ventura, who grew up Sicilian in New York, says that as a kid he thought Sinatra was in his family. His book The Death of Frank Sinatra is not really about Sinatra. It's about men like Ventura, who drew part of their style and sense of self from Frank. He reads from the only section in the book where Sinatra actually appears: an account of a Sinatra concert, circa 1994. He says he wanted to write about the older Sinatra because the older Sinatra contains all the ages of Sinatra. All of them come forward when he sings. (11 minutes)